It doesn't take long for Clint to get fidgety. He's comfortable with tight spaces (sometimes I really hate that when we're wedged into vents for hours for surveillance), but only when there's a purpose to it. Sitting here waiting is driving him crazy.
We should be doing something.
We can't. I'm sure Bitch-face is going to be looking for us.
Ryder rolls over, collides with a large carton of rice, and wakes up with a startled "No!" Nat goes to slap a hand on his mouth but he seems to remember just in time that he needs to be quiet. He sits up slowly, pulling his knees to his chest and watching all of us like an abused puppy in a shelter.
"Nick? Are you okay?" I whisper, sliding over to sit next to him. Do you know sign language? I want to talk to him but I don't want to give our position away.
Only British. He's fingerspelling everything painstakingly. I know just enough about British Sign Language to know it is really, really different from ASL. Trying to have a conversation across the language barrier would probably only result in Ryder getting more frustrated than he is now.
"What's wrong?"
He shakes his head slowly, like he's trying to get something out of his head. "I can't stop remembering. I can't get out of that room." He's shaking, breathing fast and shallow. He's going to go into a panic attack if I don't get him to calm down. Fortunately I made my living talking people off ledges; real and emotional.
"Nick, I promise, you're not going to have to go back there. Ever." It might be a naïve thing to say, because there's no telling what S.H.I.E.L.D. will do to him if they get their hands on him, but I doubt if Coulson has anything to say about it that he'll get thrown into more testing. He protected Nat, after all. "We're going to make certain of it."
"People like you lie." I can understand that he won't trust government people. But we did just save his life.
"Nick, we're all like you. We shouldn't be trusted, or we shouldn't even be here. But our agency trusts us. Clint used to do a carnival trick show and he was an assassin for a while. Nat's genetically modified like you. And I'm a sign language interpreter. I'm not even an agent. But they trust me. And they'll trust you too. It won't be like Karakoff. You won't get forced into anything you don't want to do. I'm sure if you want to disappear, have a new life somewhere, they can arrange it."
He looks at me hopelessly. "No, they'll lock me in a cage somewhere. I'm too dangerous to let go. You know that." He's probably right. I want to believe that S.H.I.E.L.D. would let him leave if he wanted to, but the reality is I'm lying to myself. I wonder if Nat wanted out when she first came.
"I'm not sure S.H.I.E.L.D. trusts anyone," Nat says quietly. "But they will do whatever they can to make staying your best option. Sometimes it turns out it's the most normal life you can hope for."
"I don't want this to be normal. I want to go back to being someone's brother and a university student and a future lawyer. Not someone's lab rat or human weapon."
"I don't know if they can find a way to reverse this, but S.H.I.E.L.D.'s science division is pretty much the best in the world. If you really want this gone, they might be able to do it." I always used to dream about suddenly waking up with superpowers. I desperately wanted to be faster, stronger, better. Even after I came to S.H.I.E.L.D. and learned to do things I thought were only possible with CG in action movies, I still was jealous of Nat. And Clint. I wanted to be so strong and agile I could flip a guy on his back for slapping my ass before he knew what hit him (Nat's relationship with the FBI was a little strained for a few months after that joint operation), or have such good vision I could track a single person a mile away in a crowded city. I never thought about what the consequences of that could be. I never thought about what it would be like to be forced to live a life that wasn't normal.
"Nick, I promise, we'll do everything we can. Our handler is one of the best. He's looked out for Nat, made sure no one ever tried to use her for her skills and forget she was a person." She nods.
"Shh." Nat presses her cheek to the floor. "Someone's talking to George."
Ryder cringes. "Please, promise me if they come to take me, you'll just shoot me." Oh God, what kind of hell has he been through that the best we can do for him is keep him from going back there by killing him? He's just a kid. He didn't deserve this.
I can think of another kid who didn't deserve the horrific life he had. Clint's turned out…okay? I mean he was an assassin for a couple years. Still is, even though that's something I kind of tend to skim over, because that means I'm an accomplice and that is just wrong on too many levels for me to even try to think about. I never expected a job as an ASL interpreter to somehow end with me sitting with an assassin on rooftops, relaying an order to take someone down.
But spiraling into the same dilemma that's kept me up for too many nights isn't going to help Ryder. He's shaking and starting to hyperventilate. I'd like nothing more than to give him another dose of that tranquilizer Nat brought, but if I do he'll probably go into a full panic on me if he's in this state already. And if we end up having to make a run for it, we don't want to be dragging an unconscious person along. Seeing as we can't leave him behind because he's the whole mission.
Instead, I turn to a tactic I've used to get people to stay calm while we work on talking them down. "Ok, listen, Nick, I'm going to ask you to count backward from ten for me in your head. Take a breath every number, okay?"
He shakes his head. "I can't."
"Just go as far as you can, okay?"
"Seven."
"Ok. Now go for six this time."
By the time he's successfully made it to two, the voices are out of range and Nat is sitting up slowly. "False alarm. A customer wanting to know if he had any octopus. I'm not entirely sure what happened because halfway through they switched into a dialect I haven't mastered yet." I shake my head at the yet. Only Nat would talk that way about her massive vocabulary of foreign languages.
"At some point, we'll have to move."
"Yes. George is waiting for the streets to clear. Hopefully sometime around 3 am he'll give us the go ahead. He's got a disguise I left here, and I'm going to be running his van out of town, like I'm making a supply run. Once we're outside London, we'll be safer. But we have a few hours left to wait." I lean back against the supply crates, and Clint sits next to me, fingers twisting into mine. There's nothing to do but sit in silence.